Clicks and Stones

Women Politicians and Gendered Hostility Online

Bibliographic Data

ID19213604
AuthorsAnnie Jarman (0009-0001-7718-3621, Washington University in St. Louis, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume56
Publication date2026-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBritish Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1234 • E-ISSN: 1469-2112
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0007123426101458
OpenAlexW7155184442
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited53

Women politicians report that social media abuse harms their personal and professional lives. However, prior text-based research finds that men receive more general online hostility than women – except among the most visible politicians. I hypothesize that backlash to perceived gender-role violations – such as public visibility – will include distinctly gendered content, such as slurs and references to appearance. Using a novel and replicable method, I analyze hostile and gendered language in three million social media mentions of US state representatives. I find that hostility towards visible women differs from men in content, not volume. Visible women face similar volumes of generic hostility but twice as much gender-specific abuse as men. This pattern holds across two alternate measures of perceived conformity to traditional gender roles: legislator tone and the presence of women in the chamber. Incorporating gendered content into text-based analyses reconciles discrepancies between observational and self-reported data and validates women politicians’ reports

Backlash · Conformity · Face (sociological concept) · Hostility · Normative · Ostracism · Social media · Tone (literature) · Visibility · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Social Media and Politics

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